Judge Denny Chin has yet to rule on the Google Book Search settlement but according to The Chronicle, Google is moving ahead and has initiated a grant program that will give select humanities researchers an opportunity to participate in text-mining research of the digitized books. The researchers will work on projects such as building software to track language changes and creating search functions to discover content of interest. It is not clear if the researchers will be able to access the controversial digitized volumes that are protected by copyright. However, as noted by Matthew L Jockers, a lecturer and academic-technology specialist in Stanford’s English department, even without the titles the corpus is “far, far bigger than anything we have had access to in the past.”
Details about the grant program are being kept quiet but it is thought that Google is seeking researchers from its university partners which have allowed their collections to be scanned.
